Entrepreneurship

On Demand Video Tutoring

Alex Kaufman and I thought that arranging traditional tutoring was too slow to help students when they really need it -- If you're up late finishing a problem set or studying for an exam the next day, there's no way to talk to a tutor in the moment. We built cs50pro.com as a way for students to instantly connect to tutors through video chat. Just like Uber, our tutors receive notifications when someone requests a session and the first person to respond is connected.

Tech in the World

Over January 2014 I traveled to Tanzania as part of the Tech in the World program to expose more CS students to international development. While there, we designed and built a system for the Ifakara Health Institute that would allow them to send Verbal Autopsy reports to and from physicians electronically, replacing a paper based system that could take over 6 months to process.

We taught short seminars on different CS topics at Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and became close friends with many of the students there! We also visited a local tech incubator and talked to entrepreneurs about the projects they were working on.

Posmetrics

While at Harvard, Merrill Lutsky and I both realized that everywhere we went, businesses wanted us to fill out customer feedback surveys, but we never did because filling out surveys later and online was such a hassle. The solution, we realized, was to put the survey right in front of the customer, before they even left the store! With a working prototype and a business plan competition under our belts by the end of the year, we raised money from an angel investor and left school to participate in Y Combinator’s W13 class.

We soon shifted our focus to hotels where our data was more actionable and built out industry specific features to differentiate ourselves. After growing to 6 employees and more than 50 installed customers, we were acquired in July 2013.

President's Challenge

Aaron Cheng, Rob Gunzenhauser and I entered the 2012 Presidents Challenge at Harvard University and were chosen as 1 of the 10 finalist teams from over 170 applicants across all of Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate schools. Our proposal was to process sewage in slums across the world in an economically sustainable way by using biodigesters to convert it into energy and fertilizer which would be sold at a profit.